GAPS IN INFORMATION ACCESS ARE A DEMOCRACY PROBLEM.

Today critical infrastructure, environmental, climatic, land use, regulatory, and demographic data is largely scattered across agencies and jurisdictions. Information is difficult to access, incomplete, outdated, or available in incompatible formats—creating a serious data governance problem as well as significant barriers to informed decision-making. In response, La Maraña has teamed up with NYUʼs Urban Systems Lab and Rebuild By Design to develop Mappa°, a digital mapping tool designed to make Puerto Ricoʼs crucial territorial data easier to find, analyse, understand, and use. The tool looks to address these challenges by bringing hundreds of datasets into a shared, accessible repository where users from all backgrounds can visualize

relationships between different conditions and identify important data gaps or limitations. By reducing data fragmentation and information friction, the platform will help community advocates better understand and defend their territories, enable NGOs to ground advocacy andprograms in reliable spatial evidence, and give architects, engineers, and planners a more comprehensive foundation for analysis and design.